HighC - some context

HighC is inspired by Iannis
Xenakis' UPIC work of the mid 80's. Contrary to most other "audio paint"
systems, HighC uses a structured (additive) synthesis model. This allows composing
elementary sound objects into higher level elements, and manipulate them
symbolically. Roughly said, HighC is to
HyperUpic
and its descendants what PowerPoint is to Photoshop.

Graphical audio synthesis and upic

Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001) was an
architect and a composer who envisioned a novel way to create music in the
1970's. His system, called
UPIC,
for "Unité polyagogique informatique du CEMAMU", used a graphics tablet and a
fairly expensive computer.

The concept behind HighC and UPIC, what I call "graphical audio synthesis",
is very simple and powerful. An audio composition is represented as a set of
marks on a score sheet, where the horizontal position and span of the mark
represent the time at which they occur and the vertical axis represents the
evolution of their pitch. In a way, it extends and generalizes traditional music
notation by making scores continuous and drawn in a linear space. An illustration
explains this concept much better: below is the score of Mycenae Alpha, one of the first
pieces created with UPIC:

The beauty of graphical audio synthesis is that it is usable by the most
novice musicians, even children, and still it provides a huge expressive space
for the most creative and demanding composers. Anybody can start creating their
own compositions in HighC or UPIC in a matter of seconds. Confirmed musicians
are offered new ways to explore soundscapes, literally to "create the unheard",
which is the essence of all artistic endeavor.

Yet, below the apparent simplicity of the concept lie a number of issues
and compromises to ponder over. The implementation of the synthesis technique is
quite trivial for anyone knowledgeable in digital audio processing. The first
issue I call the "representation" problem: First of all, a simple sound is not
simply a trajectory of pitch in time. A sound has other evolving attributes,
such as its intensity and timbre. For a faithful representation to be provided,
those attributes should be encoded in the visual image of the soundscape.
Second, because our visual and auditory systems have very different ways of
composing elementary signals to give them a meaning, any visual representation
of audio is doomed to miss something of the audio stimulus, or to create a
perceptual distortion. As an example, I believe the main weakness of the current
approaches is that they do not reflect the harmonic properties of sound: 2
sounds separated by approximately an octave look quite the same on the score,
but they sound very differently depending on whether they are at unison or
separated by a 7th or 9th.

Still, UPIC encountered much enthusiasm and was used by numerous
contemporary music composers in the 80's and 90's despite its limited
availability. Despite newer versions being written, the software-only UPIC has not been widely distributed and is not maintained
anymore. Still, the CCMIX
continues to maintain and evolve Iannis Xenakis' musical vision nowadays.
Fortunately, thanks to nowaday's progress in computing power, massive additive synthesis,
at the heart of UPIC and HighC synthesis models,
is now available to a large audience on commodity hardware, with far more features
and ease of use.

Organic vs. symbolic graphical audio synthesis

UPIC has inspired quite a few other interesting tools, such as
HyperUpic
and its heirs: Metasynth and
Coagula (or try at
Unesco). Yet, somehow, the most successful of those inheritors are bitmap-based
rather than vector-based as was the original UPIC: the image is
interpreted as a sonogram which is turned into a sampled sound by means of some
kind of inverse Fourier transform. This synthesis technique provides very good
means to literally chisel audio objects, add or remove effects at a very
fine granularity. This technique definitely has its uses, and all those programs
are great tools in the hand of capable musicians or even amateur to "create the
unheard".

One of the key specificities of HighC over a few of these counterparts is
that it is a symbolic system rather than an organic synthesis
system. In HighC (as in UPIC), a piece is made of sound curves, and each curve
is an individual object with its own properties, all numerically described. The
composition is not an organic bitmap from which the acoustic phenomena emerge
through a unique transformation. Simply said, HighC is to HyperUpic what MS
PowerPoint is to Adobe Photoshop, or what
Meccano is to
Plasticine.

This has one drawback, namely that the representation of the auditory
experience is not completely truthful ; it leaves room for interpretation. For
instance, a sound with a noise waveform will be heard exactly the same whatever
the pitch at which you place it.

However, I believe it is interesting to keep the ability to manipulate
sounds as symbols: it lets you introduce the power of
language (or assembly of symbols organized by rules) into your music
creation activity. By "power of language", I mean that HighC makes it possible
to create and manipulate higher level abstractions made of low level sound
components, and combine them with each other transparently into even more
sophisticated compositions.

It turns out, it is the essence of music composition to create such
abstractions from raw acoustic events and combine them according to one's whim
into more complex structures. Whether or not music is a language is a debate I
won't enter into. In any case, HighC lets you create a language to manipulate
sound, rather than propose you a single method for chiseling into a glob of
sound.

The goal of HighC is to integrate this musical-language-building approach
into a graphical audio composition tool.

The HighC approach over representational and structuring dilemma

I was lucky enough to do a month-long internship in 1984 as a high school
student to experiment with UPIC. The concepts behind this instrument,
most notably its ability to create a sense of
synesthesia have kept
fascinating me, as I think they reveal a lot of insights on what human computer
interaction is about: transforming objects made of bits into representations
made of atoms and vice-versa.

My own specialty is not music, but human-computer interaction, or, as I'd
rather call it, interactive information
systems design. The area of audio-painting/drawing raises numerous
challenges, issues and compromises about representation, structuring and
manipulation vocabularies, where I can put my experience at play.

-

HighC represents my solution to the representational and structuring dilemma
I mention above. The software is still far from what I envision currently, and
my vision still needs to be elaborated and explicated. A newer version of
this page should fill the gap to explain the choices made here.

-

I started working on my own sound synthesis algorithms in 1991, had an
extensive work phase in 1998 to polish up the model. I finally started writing
a user interface to create music by drawing it in 2006. Version 1 was released
in March 2007, and presented at IRCAM in June. In November 2007, version 1 had
reached 10000 downloads, a sure mark that some interest is being raised. Still,
the present version is only a sketch: it needs a lot of polishing and user testing to become a real
instrument, and there are many more features that I intend to implement over the
next few years to provide better control of the sounds, their dynamics,
modulation and spatialization.

In releasing a partially featured version, my intend is to gather useful feedback early
on, rather than deliver too complex a software that would not satisfy important
requirements.

If you know how to use a drawing program, you'll know how to use HighC. I wish
readers to try out HighC, and report on their uses
on the forums.

Last, but not least, HighC is pronounced with a strong French accent: "I see!".